Graphene and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are potential candidates for replacing silicon in electronic devices such as logic devices. Due to their high conductivities, these materials also find use as transparent conductors, competing with traditional conducting oxides for use in electronic devices such as photovoltaics, displays, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and the like. One essential step in making any electronic device is the patterning of material through etching. This process defines the active device area for electrical transport. For graphene and nanotubes, the most common way of patterning is through the use of oxygen plasma which etches these carbon materials. This process is costly and time consuming due to requirements of vacuum and plasma power and does not result in well-defined chemistry at the edges. Moreover such process requires a photolithography step to protect the device area before etching.
In recent years, manufacturing of carbon based devices has been demonstrated using ink-jet printing, stamping using poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS), and self assembly. This decreases the cost significantly, however one bottleneck has always been the carbon etching step which is still done with oxygen plasma that increases the overall cost of manufacturing. Oxygen plasma is inherently non-controllable, leaving various functional groups on the exposed portion of the graphene. With the electronic industry looking forward to build medium performance, low cost electronic devices form graphene and CNTs, it is important to find processes which can pattern these materials without plasma treatment.